Category Archives: Accounting, Business & Finance
This is a place for the professional-related stuff I do from time to time. A lot more can be found on http://www.quoracy.com
Chats between Guv and Peeps #1. Leaving the EU.
Guv: Hey, Peeps, shall we remain in the European Union or shall we leave?
Peeps: Well, you know what, Guv, in view of what Merkel is doing and how Obama threatened us with the end of the queue for trade deals, I suppose, marginally, we’d better go, hadn’t we? I am sure we’ll find a way to be independent.
Guv: OK, that’s what we’ll do, then.
Peeps: OK, Good luck. Sie schaffen das, hur hur hur.
Two and a half years later:
Guv: Well, Peeps, it’s now nearly three years later, Obama is long gone, Merkel’s on her way out, there’s lots of countries in the EU that would be our allies these days for a less federalist Europe. The guy in charge of the USA is all infavour of our leaving now, but for his own benefit. It’s clear that the whole business of leaving has a lot more issues than we knew about before, and you’ve got 5% more young people who wanted to stay in the electorate now, so are you QUITE SURE you still want to leave?
Peeps: How dare you ask us again? We gave you a clear signal? Wanna go undermining our demotrachic rights?! Disgusting!!!!
Huliganov rants on money launderer
Playout date: 8 February 2007
Duration: 11:28
Views at the time added to HTV: 3,136
Likes at the time added to HTV: 20
Dislikes at time added to HTV: 1
Popularity % ” ” ” =L/(L+D): 95.2%
Comments at time added: 6
Total interactions at time added: 27
Camera: Logitech Webcam
Post Production: Windows Movie Maker – slight use
Location: Office at Jazdow
Other people featured: None
Genre: Hulirant
Music used: Jimmy Ruffin “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?” chipmunk style
Languages used: English
Animals/plants featured: Clown loaches, Ameca splendens
Other remarks:
Huli blows the gaff on an attempt to involve him in a big seven million dollar money laundering venture involving Cote d’Ivoire.
After the rant comes a joke and a song, and a view out of the office window, as well as the true origin of the word “Internet” a borrowing from Russian.
Quote of the clip: “Little ranting, little singing, little joking: zat’s vot it’s all about.”
What’s going on #3 – What they shouldn’t teach you at Harvard…
Yesterday, I was informed by a colleague from my previous company that a complimentary copy of Harvard Business Review had arrived for me. I said, that’s ok, I didn’t order it, it’s just a sales attempt, you can throw it away. I had no time to go there just to collect a magazine that has mainly very tedious content.
While throwing it away, though, she noticed what was on the reverse side, and called me back.
“There’s also a certificate with your name on it showing that you have been awarded some qualification”.
I thought, “that can’t be, but maybe she means that I received something from someone else in the same pack” and so I made my way over to the old firm from where I was, in a taxi at some expense as I was short on time, only to discover that the back page of these special selling editions of the Harvard Business Review contain phoney certificates looking like you have been awarded something until you see the word “specimen” in feint print diagonally across it. In other words, using false pretenses, they cause me damages to my wallet and my time. The rest of the day was out of kilter, and the total value of thei
r unethical attack was at least 100 dollars of damage to me in various ways. And this they probably do to thousands and thousands of other business professionals.
They don’t care, they know it’s not their damage, anything to sell a course that isn’t even an accredited MBA and is highly likely to pay back the time put into it. They know full well that they can get away from it and do it. What a terrible shame to do these things while bearing the illustrious name of Harvard. I’m only glad it’s not my university, although “Cambridge” has more than its fair share of parasites also.
Quite frankly I would like to send them back a certificate calling them certified fraudsters and put the word “specimen” on it in a similar way. The best revenge though is for bloggers to keep writing. For people interested in sharing thoughts freely to keep building, which is what we do here, people on WordPress and other blog portals. We get you to think and show you the world and share ideas. In the case of this place, the biggest free idea is of course the Goldlist Method, but we don’t send out pretend qualifications certifying that you have finished some course with me placing my name and self-styled title in some “Institute” I’ve dreamed up.
You have to raise an eyebrow at the ethics of someone who puts his signature on the bottom of something that certifies that you have received this or that qualification whn you haven’t really, and then backs out using the word “wzor” painted over it feintly. It is the behaviour of the con-artist and phoney. And I am truly sorry to see that the methods of Harvard Business Review are so poor and pathetic. They should not be teaching this at Harvard.
Please state in the comments if you think, given the way I was inconenienced by this and no doubt others also, if HBR are using ethical or unethical sales techniques here and what it says about what they have to teach us in their courses.
My Brexit Solution
Here’s a thought. The EU moghuls want the UK to pay a €60b Brexit bill. That would be about €2000 per working UK citizen. Some people don’t want to pay that and want a hard Brexit, some are happy for us to pay and hopefully enjoy the benefits of market freedoms in the future.
Why does this have to be a one size fits all approach? Would it not be better (I know this is an alien concept to the EU and politicians/lawmakers in general, but…) to democratise it? Let those British people who want to have a permanent set of personal rights in the EU as they do now pay for an additional ID card like a superpassport (could be the prototype of a real EU passport) at €2000 per head or €5000 for a couple and their dependent children, with subsequent top up payments of say a quarter of the entry sum annually (collected say every four years) and the same for EU nationals wishing to work in the UK. Likewise companies wishing to import or export goods and services under the four freedoms would pay based on their employee numbers not having the card. If all their employees including subbies had the card then the company could trade up to a certain volume per head of employee based on what appears normal in databases like Amadeus. If they wanted to import unusual amounts for the size of the workforce in their sector then even if all their workforce are paid up Europeans they could make top-up payments for higher export and again that would work in both directions.
Then people, and private companies, can actually decide to be European or not. Their contributions would among other things fund their own representation as a constituency of UK Europeans in the European Government at all levels and they would also vote for their representatives. EU nation states citizens wishing to do border and tariff-free trade in the UK and buying the card in that direction could also vote for their own MP in the UK parliament, their own representation even in the House of Lords and representation at other levels of government as relevant to them. If living in the UK, they would remain entitled to vote in local elections.
In other words, the EU as far as the UK is concerned and vice versa would be an individual driven, opt-in system with complete respect for the individual and whether they identify as European or not.
If it works then it could after some years become a blueprint for further EU expansion or for those nations in the EU today potentially, for all we know as most are afraid to have a referendum, against the will of the majority of their people.
Ode to a Lazy Subordinate
(I don’t really mean this, it’s just a humorous poem, which I wrote ten years ago, and just came across it going through old papers…)
If you were a daphnia,
A hydra or a snail,
You’d be more scared of a clown loach
Than of a killer whale.Small things bother the little ones
Great things bother the great
So don’t come at me with your issues
Trying to upwardly delegate.
Airport shops – a Poll
I sometimes think that airport shops are simply there to prey on the captive audience which is standing around, bored, waiting for a plane. I always laugh when they ask me to show my boarding card – even if I tell them I’m not leaving the EU and therefore have to pay the VAT, not that it makes any difference most of the time if you are leaving the EU – it’s like you’re getting privileged treatment to be able to pay a few dozen percent more than you’d pay on the highstreet.
It works a bit like hotels. The posher they are, the more they rip you off with overpriced minibars, extra for internet, and nonsense like that. The same Cialdini-ism seems to be used in reverse by these airport shops, in that they think that if they treat you like rubbish and overcharge you, then you’ll feel like you are in a privileged setting and that it behoves you to shell out for things you probably didn’t even want or need in the first place.
Some places are worse than others, but the airports that will actually give you some kind of bargain seem to be in the minority, an increasing small minority.
One time in Prague airport I wanted to buy a deodorant as it was a hot day and I didn’t normally carry a toilet bag as I had a flat in Prague with that job. I was asked by the sullen saleswoman if Warsaw was my final destination. I quipped that I hoped not, as I hoped to go to heaven one day. At this her eyes clouded over, she just took the purchase out of the bag, placed it on a little shelf in her booth and refused to serve me.
Evidently I had offended against the culture of the Czech Republic. I knew they were the most atheistic country in the world, I just didn’t realise they were so religious about it.
What’s your experience with airport shops? Do you tend to use them or not?
Greece as a Financial Plutoid
Ironically it is the solidarity of Europeans with their common culture that could drag down the EUR. Nobody wants Greece out of the EURO because it’s the cradle of European civilisation. However, as far as economy and attitude are concerned, they are outside the other members.
I would liken the case of Greece to that of the planet Pluto. Scientists reckoned Pluto was a planet for a while, and included it in the planet club as the ninth planet of the Solar system. After a while, scientists saw that it was too remote to be a planet really, and belonged among these other “dwarf planets” or “plutoids” that kept on being discovered, ie the so-called Kuiper Belt.
Greece is still a Euro-Zone country, a planet, because people haven’t managed to determine the reclassification – we don’t have an economical Kuiper Belt to reassign Greece too. We are also wary of the effect of a nation that would contuniue to be an EU member being squeezed out of the EURO, left to fend for itself and failing to do so. Regardless of the poverty and problems that would ensure, the nation would still be in the EU. They would still be having their hand out for subsidies one way or another.
If they were removed from the EU and plunged into economic chaos, then probably the Chinese would come back and renew their bid for the Port of Thessalonica again, but this time there would be less to stop a potential dictator sweeping aside the mess Orban style and enabling Chinese investment, which would put the cradle of Western Civilizisation in thrall to the Han Dynasty.
On a lighter note, just because Pluto became a non-member of the planets club, it doesn’t mean that the infection passed on to Neptune or Uranus. Portugal seems to be taking its medicine, Ireland too. While in Greece there is chaos with people out on the streets burning stuff and there seems to be little to show for the previous EU investments while the Iberian countries made significant improvements to their infrastucture and invested their fundings more wisely.
Logic would say get rid of Greece. Sentiment towards our common culture says “bale them out some more”. And unfortunately, they know that.
Related articles
- Surface of Pluto May Contain Organic Molecules (space.com)
- Give Pluto Your Stamp of Approval (wired.com)
- What if Greece goes Bankrupt? Astrology suggest this might be for the Best! (debramoolenaar.wordpress.com)
- Pluto’s Surface May Contain ‘Building Blocks of Life’ (inquisitr.com)
- There really could be a giant planet hidden far beyond Pluto [Astronomy] (io9.com)
In the Eastern Forest
| Playout date: | 3 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – medium use |
| Location: | Primorskiy Kray, Russia |
| Other people featured: | Various Foresters |
| Genre: | Environmental |
| Music used: | Solovenko Ukrainian Songs |
| Languages used: | Russian, Ukrainian |
| Animals featured: | Not many other than the ladybirds on the video, but this is the domain of the Siberian Tiger, black bear and snow leopard. Numerous unusual forest plants are also seen in the gallery |
It’s a long story how I came to be here, and in fact I can’t go into details at it involves work – I ended up auditing the forestry operators of a territory larger than Greater London. The climate was hard and the Mosquitos were hard. I was working for China, and they needed an English speaker who knew Due Diligence and knows Russian, and they received recommendations that I was the man for the job.
Well, it took all summer five years ago, and I still have the Mosquito bites. The gallery shots show in places the anti mosquito suit they managed to bite through. suffice it to say they are simply not in the same league as the European ones.
This is one of my earliest “gallery style” films showcasing photographs and I haven’t really got the style right, they are flashing through too quickly and they’re not fading into each other as I started doing when I got the hang of it.
But still some of the photos are not too bad though I say so myself and worth a few additional comments – the foresters were very friendly folk, we spend a great few days with people that live a very close to nature way in the forest in conditions that most of us would find wearing. These are not the kind of parks you get in Europe. They are logging and replanting in forests that are being cultivated effectively for the first time. This sort of forest in Europe exists only in any size in Bialoweza, where the bison are. The fauna here is very varied, but it’s not common to see them. When I went behind a tree to go to the toilet at one point, I saw a Siberian chipmunk, or “burunduk” – but when I told the woodsmen about it they said that when I go off to have a leak I’d better let them know so that they can cover with a rifle, because it’s when they do what I just did that they come across other “stripey animals” but ones who are more inclined to attack us than the burunduk are!
We saw cedar nut trees and manchurian nut, and those strange grape like things that you see in the woodsman’s hand – to get them he swung out over a fifty-foot drop on a tree branch, as agile as a monkey. Also you’ll see the huge ladybirds that they had there, you can see one that landed on me – they are so pick that when they land on you it feels like someone’s flicked you with their finger.
The tipped over lorry full of logs you can see in one photo there goes to show how tough the terrain is there – they basically dig their roads out as they woork the forest.
Don’t miss also near the end the home-made fitness area they made for themselves from various machine parts. It showed their skill in making do.
Related articles
- Poland says Russians partly to blame for air crash that killed president (guardian.co.uk)
- Muscovites mark “Year of Forest” by planting new trees near city (rt.com)
- At least 20 killed, 17 missing in Ukraine mine accidents (ctv.ca)
- Become a Fool for Forests (philipcarrgomm.wordpress.com)
- Russia Forest Fires Being Hidden By Local Authorities, Environmentalists Say (huffingtonpost.com)
- Who would win a fight a siberian tiger or moose (wiki.answers.com)
